Oscar del Rio's comment on a previous entry has ledme to take a look at blastwave.org for my Sun freeware needs; I had previously tried out sunfreeware.com , mostly becausethat comes up first for a Google search on [Sun Freeware] .

Blastwave is a breath of fresh air on Solaris, in that it is a clumsierversion of what I've come to expect as basic functionality from Linuxpackage managers like apt and yum : you have your automatic fetchingof stuff and running of pkgadd

There is a persistent belief, held by a large assortment of even fairlyexperienced people, that Unix files have a creation time. They don't.

The belief generally arises because one of the three times that allUnix files have is called ctime , going along with mtime and atime .However, the 'c' stands for 'change', not 'creation'; an inode's ctime is updated more or less any time various data fields in the inode itselfare changed.

(The exact details of

One of the cornerstones of my X setup is an xterm feature that a lot ofpeople probably haven't heard of: -ziconbeep . The manpage explanationis too long and obscure to quote, so I'll summarize: if an iconified(aka minimized) xterm with -ziconbeep gets output, it puts ' *** ' atthe front of its title (technically only the icon name) and optionallybeeps. (When you de-minimize the xterm, the title addition goes away.)

This probably

It's easy in awk to get fields counting from the start of a line;the first field is $1 , the second field is $2 , and so on. Butperiodically I'm not interested in fields at the start of the line, I'minterested in a field at the end of the line; it's much easier to seethat it's the third-last field than to carefully count how many fieldsit is from the start.

(And sometimes you have a

One of the important skills for Unix programming is the ability to parsemanpages carefully. This is not as easy as it looks, because manpagesare traditionally written in a style where everything is important andyou have to think carefully about the implications of the exact wordingused.

(This can be useful for other things than Unix manpages, since a lot ofspecifications are written in the same style.)

For example, today I was emailed a comment on my Pythonsocket module irritation entry pointing out the existence of the .

If you can answer this, you are not paying attention is a nice illustration and discussion of the importance of thinkingabout what you're writing in prompts and questions in software.Also interesting is a followup entry on whyeveryone is so against using 'yes' and 'no' for answers in dialog boxes.

(From Daring Fireball .)

Here's a brief history and explanation of how cut and paste works in theX Windows system (to give it its formal name), prompted by this blogentry withthe entirely reasonable gripe that selecting something in a program andthen exiting the program causes the selection to disappear.

There are two separate cut and paste mechanisms in X, from two separateeras: the cut buffer and selections.The cut buffer is the older mechanism, and works by having programs storethe cut data into an X property on the

A while back I wrote about the two faces of RSS , in the process of which I held up Slashdotas an example of a site where I preferred the actual site to thesyndication feed by a large margin, and why.

I have to change that, because Slashdot has lost me as a regular visitorto their website, and what Slashdot stuff I read nowadays is almostentirely through their RSS feed. It's for the traditional reasons: awebsite redesign that actually injected 'design'.

Slashdot used to

We rebooted this server Monday around 6:50pm, so a number of the statsare truncated this week. Having said that, this week, we:

• got 11,369 messages from 257 different IP addresses.
• handled 15,931 sessions from 851 different IP addresses.
• received 87,698 connections from at least 31,657 different IPaddresses since Monday evening.
• hit a highwater of 6 connections being checked at once sinceMonday